Communism and the remorse of an innocent victimizer

Abstract

This memoir assesses life under a Communist regime. It attacks the stigma of the grim, fightening and oppressive regime is attacked and describes life as, for the most part, normal. People adjusted, bread had to be earned, families enjoyed each other's company. In the morally ambivalent world of communist Bulgaria everyone was both victim and victimizer. Few dissented, few intended evil. More typical were experiences of compliance, complicity, and informing on friends and neighbours just to get by. The author describes his own coming to terms with the harm done by compliance and his gradual shift into a more active political stance. The book challenges the assumptions about communism, democracy and eastern europe. There are chilling insights into the costs of complicity under Bulgarian communism which raise uncomfortable questions about the moral dimensions of going along in any system.